arXiv:2511.16549cs.LG2025-11

用奇异值分解剔除模型偏见,提升公平性且不损失性能

FairLRF: Achieving Fairness through Sparse Low Rank Factorization

  • 通过分析SVD分解后的矩阵元素,识别并移除导致群体偏见的部分
  • 在多个数据集上显著降低不同群体间的预测差异,同时保持高准确率
  • 适合关注模型公平性的医疗、金融等领域研究者与工程师

随着深度学习在医疗诊断等敏感领域广泛应用,如何在保持高性能的同时确保模型公平性日益重要。现有去偏方法多依赖计算开销大或导致精度显著下降的策略,难以在资源受限场景落地。本文提出面向公平性的低秩分解框架FairLRF,利用奇异值分解(SVD)而非传统压缩目的,发现单位矩阵中部分元素对不同敏感属性群体的偏见贡献不均。基于此,提出选择性移除这些偏见诱导元素的方法,有效缓解群体差异。大量实验表明,该方法优于传统低秩分解及当前主流公平性增强技术。消融实验进一步分析了关键超参数对性能的影响。据我们所知,这是首个将SVD用于公平性提升而非压缩的开创性工作。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

As deep learning (DL) techniques become integral to various applications, ensuring model fairness while maintaining high performance has become increasingly critical, particularly in sensitive fields such as medical diagnosis. Although a variety of bias-mitigation methods have been proposed, many rely on computationally expensive debiasing strategies or suffer substantial drops in model accuracy, which limits their practicality in real-world, resource-constrained settings. To address this issue, we propose a fairness-oriented low rank factorization (LRF) framework that leverages singular value decomposition (SVD) to improve DL model fairness. Unlike traditional SVD, which is mainly used for model compression by decomposing and reducing weight matrices, our work shows that SVD can also serve as an effective tool for fairness enhancement. Specifically, we observed that elements in the unitary matrices obtained from SVD contribute unequally to model bias across groups defined by sensitive attributes. Motivated by this observation, we propose a method, named FairLRF, that selectively removes bias-inducing elements from unitary matrices to reduce group disparities, thus enhancing model fairness. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms conventional LRF methods as well as state-of-the-art fairness-enhancing techniques. Additionally, an ablation study examines how major hyper-parameters may influence the performance of processed models. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work utilizing SVD not primarily for compression but for fairness enhancement.

模型公平性奇异值分解去偏方法

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